Installed and configured SQL Server 2012 after losing our old database server over the weekend.

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Came into work on Monday, November 8 to find that we couldn't access our database server. After a couple of attempts to reboot we realized we were wasting our time and started looking at our options.

(A little backstory. About year ago, we purchased a pretty beefy server, at least for us, to set up VM's to replace some of our aging servers. In the previous year, we lost two tower servers (file storage and a web server) and decided to virtualize to allow us to begin moving all of our servers into a rack and off of the various shelves we had sitting in our server room. We have been reducing physical servers and have gone from 8 when I started here 2 1/2 years ago down to 4 currently. Some were virtualized and some were just combined with other servers that had available resources.)

We had already purchased the required licenses for Server 2012 and I started setting up a new server in Hyper-V while another team member tried to see if he could pull anything off of the old server. Luckily, we had a back up from the previous Thursday on a storage server but Friday's had not been transferred and was lost. After getting the VM up, I contacted our vendor to get a SQL Server 2012 License and began to install it. Meanwhile, Josh had contacted our software vendor to get them prepared to help out. With their assistance we started setting up our databases and restoring our backups. At 4:00 we were over halfway home and able to leave work. On time! In an nine hour day, working through lunch, we were able to get the new SQL Server up and running and restore our backups. Josh monitored the backup progress overnight and in the morning we had to clean up a few things and we were back to normal in a half hour.

Where the big part for me comes in is that for the past two months I have been researching and testing ways to automate the moving of backup files from the server to a storage server. The old scripts were lost on the old server and none of us had any ideas on how to write them. I contacted a friend from a local IT group and got a script to move the files and spent about a month and a half learning how to adapt it to our environment and schedule it as an automated task while keeping track of all the day-to-day things. And I spent the past week learning how to write a PowerShell script to automate the cleanup, which I posted about in the PowerShell group before writing this.

A big "Thank you!" to all of the people on Spiceworks who helped make this possible. Everything I did was a result of searching the 'net and Spiceworks.